Stun

"stash accessible anywhere" is now a toggle in the gameplay options menu. (probably one of the best inventory improvements they've made, next to adding the second row in the main inventory IMO)

Er... is it usual for the Off hand to be more accurate than the main hand?

Did they fix the Dex bug?

I remember my first playthrough of BG1. I think I spent 1 hour rolling my character's stats. (There's a 1/100 chance to get 18/00 strength. Which wouldn't normally be a problem... just keep rolling till you get it! Except that often times you'll get that 18/00 on an otherwise sh*tty roll - which means....keep trying. So I do. about an hour later I settle for 18/99 Str, because that particular roll allowed me to have 18s 3 other stats! Woot!) So finally I start the game proper. No problems in Candlekeep. In fact, no problems at all until the Friendly Arm Inn, and there, I run into my second time sink. F*cking Tarnesh. He wipes me and Imoen out. Reload. Does it again. Reload...this time I get lucky and the fight attracts the guards and they help us..... unfortunately, Tarnesh manages to kill my character about 2 seconds before one of the guards chunks him. Reload. This time I totally get lucky. My character scores a hit on him right off the bat, interrupting his mirror image. He dies shortly after that. Time elapsed to this point: 3 hours. inside the Friendly Arm Inn I remember falling madly in love with BG1 right about here. The FAI has 3 floors! Time to look around...and steal stuff (time sink #3!). I manage to get one chest open. I get caught. reload. Try it again.... succeed. Then I talk to the guy who thinks I'm a butler.... gives me his Pantaloons to wash and press. They're...Unidentified? Ack. We have no mage in our party. So I get out the manual and look up how to deal with unidentified stuff. it says: shops and temples. So I go downstairs to the innkeeper.... he can't identify it. So I go next door to the temple. Gnome priestess identifies it. I spend a few minutes reading the item description. hilarious. I go back to the inn. I go back upstairs. Talk to people. Find a Dwarf who wants me to visit a town and kill the spiders in her house. Leave Friendly arm inn; visit house next door, half-naked old lady wants me to kill some hobgoblins who stole her ring. Says they're just outside the walls. So that's cool. I can do that real quick. So I go out, scout the area outside the walls.... manage to make a gigantic counter clockwise circle of the premises. After about 20 minutes, I find them. I then kill them, and maneuver my way back to the lady (joia, I think her name is). I give her the ring. she thanks me, And then she leaves! Sweet. Time to loot her house. Time Elapsed: 5 hours...or... a 4th of the game? Screw that. NO ONE does BG1 in 20 hours on a 1st playthrough. No one.

Ok... You've either never played an MMO, or you've never Played BG1. My guess is the latter. Even normal loot is hard won in BG1, which means "blasting through the game in 20 hours on your first playthrough", without doing any of the game's side content, will leave you woefully underpowered, and thus subject to reloads, and everything that goes along with reloads, like re-doing the areas since your last save (not to mention leaving you with a sub-optimal party, since some of the most powerful party members have to be searched for off the beaten path). But to be fair, this is beside the point, since not many of BG1's side quests actually send you off that far into the wilderness (almost all of the city's quests can be completed without leaving the city) But speaking of those "MMO fetch quests" I forget... can you, by chance, list me some of those "collect 5 X and return them to me", Or, "gather 6 Y and turn them in, and "secure these 7 areas and report back" quests that BG1 is filled with? Because I can't seem to remember those. And that IS what MMO fetch quests are all about. There is the Bandit scalp collection thing with Officer Vai. And that's.... THE ONLY ONE IN THE WHOLE GAME. But I digress. the claim that it's the side quests that make BG1 take so much longer is silly on its own. BG1 is about exploration. That is where the time sink is. It has dozens of fairly large wilderness maps and clearing them out is what takes so much time. The city alone has countless buildings in it, and simply walking into every single one of them to see what's inside can take...oh...5-10 hours by itself? And, as you know, a first time player has no idea which ones have nothing noteworthy in them, and which ones have The Best Loot In The Game (see: Helm of Balduran; cloak of Balduran, Helm of Glory, Tome of Dexterity, Necklace of missiles etc) And then there's the Traps! Oh god...the traps. Now, I'm sure you're ready to tell us all that you just blasted through the Maze under the thieves guild on your first playthrough - Sweeping aside those skeleton warriors as they shot you with ice arrows while you were trying to disarm those insta-kill lighting bolt traps so that you could actually...you know... move forward without dying. And we won't discuss the Cloakwood. Not too deeply, at least. Although it's still needs to be pointed out that there's no way to dispel Web in Bg1. And the second Cloakwood map has many web traps. You know, those web traps that you'll detonate, one at a time, if you're just blasting through the area. And once those traps go off, you know what happens. That's right, here come the huge, giant, phase, sword, and wraith spiders to attack your party. Oh WAIT! I know your response to this: "Ahem! In my first playthrough, I guessed correctly and equipped everyone with those rings and potions of free action that I found, from all those quests and areas I didn't bother doing!" Or... "Hahahaha! On my first playthough I managed to guess correctly and stop the "blast through-ing" at just the right places to search for traps, and disarm all of them!" Like I said, your hyperbole is pointless here. The majority of us have played Bg1. No 1st time player will finish it in 20-30 hours unless he skips half of it. And you know full well you were NOT talking about minimalist-first-playthroughs

A lot of people keep saying this. As if PoE is just another one of those little, under-the-radar games, being released by some indie studio no one's ever heard of. You all are underestimating....everything. It's far more accurate to say that PoE happens to be the next RPG..... from the same company that gave us Fallout New Vegas, and South Park Stick of truth. It's also accurate to say that advertising budget or not, the game has gotten an unusual (almost disproportionate) amount of press coverage over the past 2 years. Far more than the Kickstarters it's being compared to (D:OS, Wasteland 2) So it's fairly safe to assume it's going to sell more than both of those games, and it's going to do it quicker.

Count on it.

And the Exit signs are....green? That's bizarro. Anyway, is there any chance whatsoever that we get to see the rest of this documentary before the game comes out? Because if it all gets here at the same time as the game then...you know... I'll be playing the game instead.

He can call it whatever he wants. But until he actually clarifies his position (instead of just coming in here and dropping meaningless one-liners left and right) He doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. Not from me, at least. Ok, lets put it another way. Planescape: Torment. Planescape Torment is the "nit-picker's" dream. The whole game is nothing but a collection of tiny little details that are tossed at you everywhere you look. A player can, of course, ignore these details and simply rush through the game, and the result? That player will get... a passable experience. Maybe 30-40 hours or so of 'effective play time'.... but none of that magic that makes PS:T great.

Fixed. Hyperbole is pointless here when the majority of us have played the IE games. You cannot just "blast through one map after another" in the IE games. You have loot to Identify and sell; you have inventories to manage; you have HP pools to heal; You have NPCs to talk to; you have quests to turn in; you have characters to individually level. And occasionally, you have encounters that require time, planning, pausing, and waiting to deal with. And none of this takes into account the first playthrough, which is what we're discussing here.

Are these things not in the game? Are they not the very definition of game content? Are the various extra secrets, dialogues, weapons, areas, people, books, journal entries, character building, and other activities not specifically placed in the game by the developers so that the players can get more playtime out of the game? There are people who will milk a game/playthrough for everything it offers. We call these people "completionists". And then there are people who do just enough to get to the end or just a little more. They're the non-completionists. And you'll notice when developers are asked "how long is this game?", they almost always make a distinction between the 2 playstyles. They do this because they designed their games to appeal to both. This is why, to me, Bryy's comment reads like "Completionist runs do not count when measuring how long a game is".

I disagree. One of the reasons why I love the IE games is because of the importance of those little details, which can add hours and hours of playtime....meaningful playtime, even. Like in Planescape torment, when you take the time to click on everything that's interactable, so that you can extract every drop of the world's lore. Or like in Icewind Dale 2, when you spend a half hour at every merchant's shop, inspecting every item, reading every item description, observing every minute stat, to see how it compares with the stuff everyone in your party currently has. Or like in BG, when you meticulously clear the fog of war on every wilderness map to make sure you didn't miss a single thing. This is the stuff that can add hours and hours to a playthrough. You can call them nitpicking if you want, but don't say they don't count. Because they absolutely do. They're what differentiate a game that was created via labor of love from a game that the marketing department slapped together by analyzing metrics.

I'll....replay it. If it turns out to be half as great as any of the IE games then it won't matter if it's 20 hours long or 200, because "hours" will cease being the measuring stick.

As silly as you're making it sound, it still balances out. Just as the little blacksmith shop interior is 1 area, so is the entire Skaen dungeon. And this is how the devs measured the IE games.

That would surprise me. In fact, it would shock me. The beta itself took me about 10 hours to do on my first playthru of it, and it's what... 1/10th of the game? (Literally. it's 15 areas out of 150), and even that doesn't take into account the potential time sinks that were intentionally omitted from it (like engaging in conversations with party members; stronghold management, etc) In any case, the devs have already given us a ballpark estimate on just how big the game is. They said it's bigger than BG1 but smaller than BG2. Well? That's a pretty darn big game. BG1 can take 70-80 hours or more for a 1st time completionist run. And again, PoE will be bigger than that.

Why does this game seem like it's going to suck..... ...my free time, my sleep time, my social life, etc.

What do you mean by 'rushing to the end and walking through blank maps'? The maps aren't blank. They're populated by monsters and other assorted challenges. The game then allows you to take your time and deal with those challenges as you see fit. And the design is non-linear in nature. There's nothing that respawning adds to this formula except make all your time and effort worthless. "hey, you cleared that dungeon and made the nearby village safe! You're a hero! No wait.... everything you killed in that dungeon has just respawned. Edit: and the "respawning keeps the world vibrant" point is little more than an argument in a vacuum. First off, Dungeons do not need to remain "vibrant" after the threat therein has been dealt with. And second, intelligent developers who wish to further the 'living world' feeling to a cleared map can easily do so without resorting to such artificial arcade-game methods like magically respawning what you previously killed there. They could, instead, place new, non-hostile set pieces in that map. For example, an abandoned warehouse is the home of a necromancer and his skeleton minions. So you go clear it out. A few days later, that warehouse is now populated by.... warehouse workers. Or, the devs could do what we saw in last weekend's demo. Send you out to a map you already cleared, in order to deal with a Bounty encounter...which wasn't on that map before you got the quest.

That's enough out of you, Lephys!

That never broke my immersion in the IE games. Everone in the IE games jogged. The only exception was PST. And oddly enough, walk mode in PS:T turned the game into a slog.

So, who wrote Aloth? Because the two characters share remarkably similar traits. They're both elves They're both mages They both have that hilariously refined 'snobbish' intellectual attitude -the way they snub their noses at a village in the game (Sand with Port Llast; Aloth with....whatever that town is called that Edér is from) Their sense of humors are exactly the same. They both have that British accent which works so well with their personalities. It's uncanny.

Toss him in the prison? Kill him? Both?

Yeah, but correct me if I'm wrong here... that was a bug. In both of the BG's. Ambient music, specifically, would simply stop playing after a while when you were exploring. If you quick saved, it came right back.

^I read that post of his as intentional Irony/Sarcasm. He says we shouldn't compare the new games with the classics, and then in the very next line he compares PoE's music with BG1's. In any case, I disagree with the entire notion, even if people are going strictly from memory. I'm 50% optimistic and 50% observant that PoE will walk right into our lives and assume its position as IE series game #6. And I'm sure that was the design goal right from the start.

Don't know. He's on Facebook. Ask him. lol

And one more thing to take out of this. Aloth is the spiritual successor to NWN2's Sand. I approve.